


a wound to heal

by kailan



Category: Exalted
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kailan/pseuds/kailan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Joyous Calibration, sister."</p>
            </blockquote>





	a wound to heal

Her touch lingers on the petals of the small eglantine rose growing in a pot on the windowsill of her modest dormitory room. It is the only hint of her home in the Imperial City: a simple thing, not like the expensive baubles gifted to her twin sister upon her Exaltation: the sister that the Empress decided isn't her sister anymore. 

Carefully she removes the little plant to her desk where she can control the amount of light it gets; for the next five days, there will be no sunlight and she doesn't want it to die. After all, it was her sister's last birthday gift to her, two weeks before Mela's touch fell upon her and she was gone.

Most of the students at the Sweetbriar School are gone over the long holiday, home with their families and celebrating the calendar change with parties and fine food. There are no friends to invite her to their homes; Viola Laskaris has never had friends. She doesn't _need_ friends. She has the beginnings of a promising career: only fourteen years old, she was chosen by one of the school's Dragon-Blooded instructors as the Wood Aspect's personal assistant. By the time she finishes primary school, she will have enough experience to open her own business. 

No one realizes that she has thrown herself into work and study because it's all she has. Relentless persistence, that is her nature, and she follows it well. But alone like this, in the quiet with little to do except think, her mind strays to old regrets.

Viola wonders if her sister is well, if House Tepet loves her like they should love a daughter. It worries her because there is much duty and little love amongst the Dragon-Blooded. Perhaps she's wrong.

She hopes so, and doubts it.

Outside there is a fireworks display in the sky and colored flashes of light flicker upon the girl's pale face like ripples in sunlit water, as if to ask why she has barricaded herself in an empty dormitory hall to nurse old wounds. 

_Sister-_

Her eyes fall upon the stack of letters from home, all unopened. Rage beats with her heart, a butterfly with bright red wings like fire, kicking the bars of its cage, and she remembers the look in Rosemary's eyes as she was folded into the Tepet carriage.

"Joyous Calibration, sister," she says aloud, and bitter tears stand in her eyes. 

Worst holiday ever, the girl thinks, and if Calibration could get any worse she cannot imagine how it could be.

Viola tears up each and every letter penned in her mother's flowing script with a cold and methodical precision, then opens the window upon the umbral sky, to let the wind carry the scraps where it will.


End file.
